Old-Fashioned Values Passed Out With Hotel Room Keys

CAMAS, Clark County - A hundred bucks or so a week buys a room, a bath down the hall and plenty of preaching at the Camas Hotel.

Clerks hand out old-fashioned values with room keys. You're welcome if you shun drugs, drinking binges, late-night visitors and more.

"Some say 'I don't need a mother, I need a room,' " said the Rev. Bob Ray Sr., a born-again Christian and retired evangelist pastor. He manages the hotel with his wife, Carmie. They live in an apartment behind the lobby.

Built in 1911 on Fourth Avenue in downtown Camas, the three-story stucco hotel is one of the oldest commercial buildings in Camas. It offers cheap, clean lodging. Counseling and Saturday night Bible study groups are on the house.

The Camas-Washougal police chaplain drops off folks in need of a room for a night. Others come on their own because they are going through a divorce or have been evicted. Some are on disability. A few stay for years.

Cheap hotels are magnets for those down on their luck. They also attract wanted criminals seeking to lie low, Ray said. But he added that he eventually will be able to use a guest's identification to check a nationwide hotel Web site to determine if the person is wanted by authorities.

Still, the Camas Hotel has had little connection with crime. With one exception. Former hotel resident Daniel Loren Jenkins Jr., 47, is due to be tried in Portland this month. Among the charges: that he tried to get someone to kill Homer Gerald Bidwell, a

stockbroker who lives on Prune Hill.

Hotel owner Dean Wallace didn't want to talk specifically about Jenkins, but said he tries to spot guests' problems and help them. He said the hotel is trying to teach what parents should have taught.

"Everyone has to be considerate of everyone else, just like in society," Wallace said.

A notice at the check-in desk reminds guests to turn to religion: "God is greater than any problem I have."

A stack of Ray's ministry business cards sits on the lobby desk. Also nearby is his pile of quickly disappearing free books on positive thinking by Norman Vincent Peale.

Ray and his wife, who ministered in Pentecostal churches nationwide and settled at the hotel in January, likened their hotel guests to an informal congregation.

"This group here is more in need than places I've been too," Ray said. "Here people come to us and they don't know what their future is."

Ray sports a souvenir from the days before he was born again, a naked angel on his arm. In his thick Southern drawl, he asks guests about their problems or invites them to occasional Bible study group Saturday nights at the hotel. He and his wife also take interested guests to their church.

His particular concern is for downtrodden men, the majority of the hotel's guests. He tells them about Promise Keepers. Ray was a North Georgia director of the nationwide religious men's group.

"They don't push it down people's throats, but they want to share their Christianity," said Kim Jones, a hotel resident with her husband for nearly a year. "It's not like you gotta go or you are going to be evicted."

Camas Police Capt. Paul Pearce said officers often were dispatched to the 30-room hotel years ago when probation and parole recommended the hotel to people. But those times have changed, Pearce said.

From January 1997 to August of this year, police had 64 calls to the Camas Hotel out of 24,000 log entries, Pearce said. Most calls were for people refusing to leave after being asked to go. Pearce called the Jenkins case the hotel's most serious arrest in the city of 10,870.

Washougal-Camas Police Chaplain Richard Edmundson of Camas runs warrant checks on the 10 to 20 or so people a year he takes to the hotel. They usually are passing through without a place to stay. The Camas-Washougal Ministerial Association provides one-night vouchers.

"We use the hotel because it is such a nice clean place to put people. They will always provide a room to help people who are in need of real help," Edmundson said.

Vancouver native Daryl Peterson, 45, didn't know about the Camas Hotel until he needed it. A Vancouver homeowner since 1993, he said he moved out of his house because of his ongoing divorce.

First, Dennis Lester, 53, lost his two jobs. Then he lost his $425-per-month one-bedroom Vancouver apartment. He lived in his old Mustang for a few nights before he came to the Camas Hotel.

About two years later, home is still a single room with a toilet down the hall.

"If you live in Washington and your funds are limited, you don't have many options. It requires too much money to put up for an apartment," said Lester. "If this place wasn't here, I would be living in my car."

Lester found a job cleaning offices at night. He bikes to work in Vancouver and is saving for a car. Meantime, he considers hotel residents family.

"It's nice that they get people together to talk," Lester said. "Because this kind of environment can be kind of lonely when you are just enclosed in a little room."